Our Demented Syphilitic Octogenarian Whooped His Diseased Gums At President Xi Jinping...,

Whitehouse Version |  President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke today with President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The conversation focused on Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. President Biden outlined the views of the United States and our Allies and partners on this crisis. President Biden detailed our efforts to prevent and then respond to the invasion, including by imposing costs on Russia. He described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians. The President underscored his support for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis. The two leaders also agreed on the importance of maintaining open lines of communication, to manage the competition between our two countries. The President reiterated that U.S. policy on Taiwan has not changed, and emphasized that the United States continues to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo. The two leaders tasked their teams to follow up on today’s conversation in the critical period ahead.

Foreign Ministry Peoples Republic of China Version |  President Biden said that 50 years ago, the US and China made the important choice of issuing the Shanghai Communiqué. Fifty years on, the US-China relationship has once again come to a critical time. How this relationship develops will shape the world in the 21st century. Biden reiterated that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; it does not aim to change China’s system; the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; the US does not support “Taiwan independence”; and it has no intention to seek a conflict with China. The US is ready to have candid dialogue and closer cooperation with China, stay committed to the one-China policy, and effectively manage competition and disagreements to ensure the steady growth of the relationship. President Biden expressed readiness to stay in close touch with President Xi to set the direction for the US-China relationship.

President Xi noted the new major developments in the international landscape since their first virtual meeting last November. The prevailing trend of peace and development is facing serious challenges. The world is neither tranquil nor stable. As permanent members of the UN Security Council and the world’s two leading economies, China and the US must not only guide their relations forward along the right track, but also shoulder their share of international responsibilities and work for world peace and tranquility.

President Xi stressed that he and President Biden share the view that China and the US need to respect each other, coexist in peace and avoid confrontation, and that the two sides should increase communication and dialogue at all levels and in all fields. President Biden has just reiterated that the US does not seek to have a new Cold War with China, to change China’s system, or to revitalize alliances against China, and that the US does not support “Taiwan independence” or intend to seek a conflict with China. “I take these remarks very seriously,” said President Xi.

President Xi pointed out that the China-US relationship, instead of getting out of the predicament created by the previous US administration, has encountered a growing number of challenges. What’s worth noting in particular is that some people in the US have sent a wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” forces. This is very dangerous. Mishandling of the Taiwan question will have a disruptive impact on the bilateral ties. China hopes that the US will give due attention to this issue. The direct cause for the current situation in the China-US relationship is that some people on the US side have not followed through on the important common understanding reached by the two Presidents and have not acted on President Biden’s positive statements. The US has misperceived and miscalculated China’s strategic intention.

President Xi underscored that there have been and will continue to be differences between China and the US. What matters is to keep such differences under control. A steadily growing relationship is in the interest of both sides.

The two sides exchanged views on the situation in Ukraine.

President Biden expounded on the US position, and expressed readiness for communication with China to prevent the situation from exacerbating.

President Xi pointed out that China does not want to see the situation in Ukraine to come to this. China stands for peace and opposes war. This is embedded in China’s history and culture. China makes a conclusion independently based on the merits of each matter. China advocates upholding international law and universally recognized norms governing international relations. China adheres to the UN Charter and promotes the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security. These are the major principles that underpin China’s approach to the Ukraine crisis. China has put forward a six-point initiative on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine, and is ready to provide further humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and other affected countries. All sides need to jointly support Russia and Ukraine in having dialogue and negotiation that will produce results and lead to peace. The US and NATO should also have dialogue with Russia to address the crux of the Ukraine crisis and ease the security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine.

President Xi stressed that with the need to fight COVID-19 on the one hand and protect the economy and people’s livelihood on the other, things are already very difficult for countries around the world. As leaders of major countries, we need to think about how to properly address global hotspot issues and, more importantly, keep in mind global stability and the work and life of billions of people. Sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions would only make the people suffer. If further escalated, they could trigger serious crises in global economy and trade, finance, energy, food, and industrial and supply chains, crippling the already languishing world economy and causing irrevocable losses. The more complex the situation, the greater the need to remain cool-headed and rational. Whatever the circumstances, there is always a need for political courage to create space for peace and leave room for political settlement. As two Chinese sayings go, “It takes two hands to clap.” “He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off.” It is imperative that the parties involved demonstrate political will and find a proper settlement in view of both immediate and long-term needs. Other parties can and should create conditions to that end. The pressing priority is to keep the dialogue and negotiation going, avoid civilian casualties, prevent a humanitarian crisis, and cease hostilities as soon as possible. An enduring solution would be for major countries to respect each other, reject the Cold War mentality, refrain from bloc confrontation, and build step by step a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture for the region and for the world. China has been doing its best for peace and will continue to play a constructive role.

The two Presidents agreed that the video call is constructive. They directed their teams to promptly follow up and take concrete actions to put China-US relations back on the track of steady development, and make respective efforts for the proper settlement of the Ukraine crisis.

NIH/CDC Fund Sanitation Projects And DoD Funds Weapons Research

thesaker  |  https://t.me/mod_russia_en/238

The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials received from employees of Ukrainian laboratories on the implementation of military biological programs of the United States and its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.

Western mass media and some biologists, who most often have a second American citizenship, express doubts about the reliability of the materials published by us. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the documents have the signatures of real officials and are certified by the seals of organizations.

We believe that components of biological weapons were created on the territory of Ukraine.

Here is a document dated March 6, 2015, confirming the Pentagon’s direct participation in the financing of military biological projects in Ukraine.

According to established practice, American projects in the field of sanitation in third countries, including in Africa and Asia, are funded through national health authorities.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the agreement on joint biological activities was concluded between the US Military Department and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. However, the real recipient of funds are the laboratories of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence located in Kiev, Odessa, Lvov and Kharkov. The total funding amounted to $32 million.

It is no coincidence that these biolabs were chosen by the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the contractor company Black & Veatch as the executors of the U-P-8 project aimed at studying the pathogens of the Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis and hantaviruses. The corresponding request of the Pentagon to involve Ukrainian laboratories for the implementation of the project is presented on the slide. From our point of view, the interest of US military biologists is due to the fact that these pathogens have natural foci both on the territory of Ukraine and in Russia, and their use can be disguised as natural outbreaks of diseases. That is why this project has received additional funding, and the terms of its implementation have been extended.

A study of the documents in the part of the P-781 project on the study of ways of transmitting diseases to humans through bats showed that the work was carried out on the basis of a laboratory in Kharkov together with the infamous R. Lugar Center in Tbilisi. The total costs of the Pentagon for its implementation in Ukraine and Georgia amounted to $ 1.6 million, most of which was received by Ukraine as the main contractor.

The documents received by the Russian Ministry of Defence indicate that research in this area is systematic and has been conducted since at least 2009 under the direct supervision of specialists from the United States within the framework of projects P-382, P-444 and P-568. One of the curators of this activity was the head of the DTRA office at the US Embassy in Kiev, Joanna Wintrall. Maybe journalists should talk to her?

During the implementation of these projects, six families of viruses (including coronaviruses) and three types of pathogenic bacteria (pathogens of plague, brucellosis and leptospirosis) were identified. This is due to the main characteristics of these pathogens that make them favourable for the purposes of infection: resistance to drugs, rapid speed of spread from animals to humans, etc.

The "Intelligence Community" Directly Interfered With The 2020 Presidential Election...,

NYPost |  They are the supposed nonpartisan group of top spies looking out for the best interest of the nation.

But the 51 former “intelligence” officials who cast doubt on The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories in a public letter really were just desperate to get Joe Biden elected president. And more than a year later, even after their Deep State sabotage has been shown again and again to be a lie, they refuse to own up to how they undermined an election.

The officials, including CNN pundit and professional fabricator James Clapper — a man who was nearly charged for perjury for lying to Congress — signed a letter saying that the laptop “has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

What proof did they have? By their own admission, none. “We do not know if the emails . . . are genuine or not,” the letter said. They’re just “suspicious.” Why? Because they hurt Biden’s campaign, that’s evidence enough.

Keep in mind this was written Oct. 19, 2020, five days after The Post published its first story. Neither Joe Biden nor Hunter Biden had denied the story, they simply deflected questions. Didn’t these security experts think that if this was disinformation, the Biden campaign would have yelled to the heavens that the story was false?

Your Humanity Is Of No Consequence In A World Designed And Ruled By Egregores...,

ineteconomics  |  The roots of the neoliberal perspective sprung from a world shattered by the collapse of empires and the chaos produced by the first World War. Austrian economists and business advocates in the 1920s and ‘30s, like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, working at the time in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, worried about how a rump nation like Austria could get along in the new global landscape. The specter of socialism and communism in Hungary, part of the old Habsburg Empire, which briefly went red in 1919, added to their anxiety. They were also afraid of rising nation-states calling the shots on economic matters by doing things like raising tariffs – especially nations governed by democracies that recognized the interests of regular people. The spread of universal male voting rights set off alarm bells that power was shifting.

How could capitalists survive without a vast network of colonies to rely on for resources? How could they protect themselves from continuing interference in business and seizures of private property? How might they resist increasing democratic demands for more broadly shared economic resources?

These were big questions, and neoliberal answers reflected their fears. From their viewpoint, the political world looked frightening and uncertain – a place where the masses were constantly agitating to disrupt the realm of private enterprise by forming labor unions, conducting protests, and making demands to reallocate resources.

What neoliberals wanted was a sacred space free from such turmoil – a transcendent world economy where capital and goods could flow without restraint. They imagined a place where capitalists were secure from democratic processes and protected by carefully constructed institutions and laws — and by force, if necessary. Neoliberals weren’t fully opposed to democracies as long as they could be constrained to provide a safe haven for capitalists, but if they didn’t, many thought that authoritarianism would do just fine, too.

These early stirrings of neoliberalism were thus a kind of theology, a utopian longing for an abstract, invisible world of numbers that humans could not spoil. In this promised land, talk of social justice and economic plans to enhance the public good was heresy. “Society” was a realm which, at best, should be kept strictly separate from the economy. At worst, it was the enemy of the global economy — the troublesome domain of nonmarket values and popular concerns that got in the way of capitalist transcendence.

After World War II, the neoliberals organized formally as the Mount Pelerin Society, in which key figures like Hayek pushed the vision of a “competitive order” where competition among producers, employers, and consumers would keep the global economy humming along smoothly and protect everybody from abuse (quite an idea, that). Protections like social insurance and regulatory frameworks were unnecessary.

Basically, the market was God, and people were here to serve it – not the other way around.

For neoliberals, the twentieth century wasn’t about the Cold War, which didn’t much interest them. It was about fighting against things like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and what they considered dangerous totalitarian schemes of economic equality. As historian Quinn Slobodian put it in his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, they set their sights on the “development of a planet linked by money, information, and goods where the signature achievement of the century was not an international community, a global civil society, or the deepening of democracy, but an ever-integrating object called the world economy and the institutions designated to encase it.”

Neoliberals dedicated themselves to protecting unrestricted global trade, crushing labor unions, deregulating business, and usurping government’s role in providing for the common good with privatization and austerity. While it’s true that most Western governments, as well as powerful global institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, are deeply influenced by neoliberalism today, it really wasn’t until the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis that most people had even heard of the movement.

That’s because, for a long time, neoliberalism invaded our lives like a stealth virus.

What Is Brandon's Socioeconomic Plan For You Unvaccinated Deplorables?

gilbertdoctorow |  As the USA and Europe have each day piled on new sanctions against Russia, the awareness of a ‘total war’ situation has penetrated the consciousness of Russia’s leadership and the tone of public discourse about the war has hardened noticeably in recent days. Talk shows which I follow regularly have changed course yet again from what I reported a week ago.  On the Vladimir Solovyov evening programs, the bearer of grim expectations about war prospects, Mosfilm general director Karen Shakhnazarov, has disappeared, his place taken by others who take the conversation in a wholly different direction, including fierce denunciations of unpatriotic personalities within Russia. Still other newcomers are presenting their own half-baked speculations on how the entire Russian economy and society has to be reorganized to respond to the new realities of a total permanent break with the West. While the Putin government remains resolutely pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship, though with a heavy dose of state direction of the economy, the new panelists in talk shows denounce free markets as just one more manifestation of the West’s hijacking in the 1990s Russia’s domestic political economy.  Still other panelists on the Russian talk shows are talking about purging the government and all public institutions of Liberals, who are synonymous with Fifth Column traitors and have no place in Russian society under conditions of a war for the country’s survival.

As BBC and other Western journalists have remarked, Vladimir Putin addressed the issue of the Fifth Column in a televised speech yesterday that was otherwise dedicated to the increases in pensions and social benefits that he just announced to counteract negative results of the newly imposed Western sanctions. In the BBC interpretation, the scum and traitors denounced by Putin are the oligarchs. These are the people who live there, meaning in the West, either physically or just mentally, while earning their money in Russia.

However, this identification with the oligarchs only shows how little Western news organizations, Western think tanks and Western government leaders know about Russia and about what makes it tick. No, oligarchs were not in the sights of Vladimir Putin yesterday: it was the multitude of little traitors to the country and its people who have in recent weeks come out of the woodwork and taken flight in an attempt to avoid having to publicly take sides in the conflict and so lose their fortunes and/or their social standing.

The broad Russian public has been utterly shocked at the departure of a good many stars in the entertainment industry, the kind of folks who in the West are images on the covers of People magazine and of the yellow press more generally. Veteran singer Alla Pugacheva and her husband Galkin have been darlings of Russian television and music halls across the country for decades.  They are known to have quietly flown to Israel, where so many of their friends from show business and from high society have already found refuge earlier still.  Then there is one of the two leading television news presenters, Sergey Briullov, host of The News of the Week on Saturday nights. Sergey carries a British as well as Russian passport; his family is based in their home in England and his children study there.  About a week ago, Briullov disappeared from Russia and eventually surfaced in Brazil, where he says he is doing a film project about the Brazilian attitude to the Ukraine-Russia War.  No one is fooled for a moment about the fact that Briullov is just one more traitor to his homeland, and comments on the Russian portals bear this out daily.

No, Messrs BBC News, it is not oligarchs whose behavior if not their very existence has embittered the middle and lower class Russians during the current war. Those middle and lower classes constitute the 70% of the population which backs Putin through thick and thin. It is the smaller fish of Fifth Column populations who exist in much greater numbers: as, for example, Russian  lawyers who have homes near the Champs Elysees and split their time between France and their law offices in Moscow, whence the money from their servicing oligarchs comes. Then there is the intelligentsia, the university dons, the occupants of often important offices in government and private public institutions who loathed Putin from his first election to the presidency in 2000 and have never relented. Their contempt for the broad Russian public, which they see as the great unwashed, as a herd of animals, was never well hidden, and this contempt is now being reciprocated on Russian state television and on the internet.

All of these fissures in Russian society are being deepened and discussed on Russian media as a result of the ongoing war for survival.  If Russia is becoming a much less free society, that is a direct result of Western pressure. But there is nothing new under the sun.  This was precisely one of the key arguments in favor of détente as opposed to confrontation during the 1990s.

Fat, Ugly, Non-Binary "Chief People Officers" Now Dominate Western Public Discourse...,

yahoo  |  Daniil Medvedev, the Russian player currently sitting at No. 1 in the ATP rankings, may not be allowed to play at Wimbledon unless he denounces Russian president Vladimir Putin.

That was the situation outlined during a meeting at British Parliament on Tuesday, where sports minister Nigel Huddleston confirmed discussions were taking place to prevent supporters of Putin from entering the world's oldest tennis tournament amid Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's tennis teams have already been thrown out of the Davis and Billie Jean King Cup, but Huddleston indicated the government wanted sanctions to go further.

From The Telegraph:

Giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select committee, Huddleston said: “It needs to go beyond that. We need some potential assurance that they are not supporters of Vladimir Putin and we are considering what requirements we may need to try and get some assurances along those lines.”

Asked whether individual Russian and Belarusian athletes wanting to come to the UK would be required to “denounce” Putin’s invasion, Huddleston said the details were still being discussed, including with other countries.

He added: “It would be better if we can decide some broad global consensus on this.”

Such an action would affect Medvedev and any other Russian and Belarusian tennis players, who are currently not allowed to play under their national flags while the Ukrainian invasion continues. There are currently four Russian players in the ATP top 30, while the WTA has three Russians and two Belarusians in its top 30.

The world of sports has seen an overwhelming and potentially unprecedented wave of bans against Russia's teams and athletes since the country's military made its move across the Ukrainian border. That has included suspensions from international competition in hockey, soccer, figure skating and many more, as well organizations removing events and business from the country and governments freezing Putin allies' assets.

Russian President Vladimir Putin Lays Out His Economic Plans For The Russian People

kremlin.ru  |  Taking part in our meeting are senior Government officials, plenipotentiary presidential envoys in the federal districts and heads of Russian regions.

We are meeting in a complicate period as our Armed Forces are conducting a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would like to remind you that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions. It is to help our people in Donbass, who have been subjected to real genocide for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways, that is, through blockade, large-scale punitive operations, terrorist attacks and constant artillery raids. Their only guilt was that they demanded basic human rights: to live according to their forefathers’ laws and traditions, to speak their native language, and to bring up their children as they want.

During these years, the Kiev authorities have ignored and sabotaged the implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures for a peaceful settlement of the crisis and ultimately late last year openly refused to implement it.

They also started to implement plans to join NATO. Moreover, the Kiev authorities also announced their intention to have nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles. This was a real threat. With foreign technical support, the pro-Nazi Kiev regime would have obtained weapons of mass destruction in the foreseeable future and, of course, would have targeted them against Russia.

There was a network of dozens of laboratories in Ukraine, where military biological programmes were conducted under the guidance and with the financial support of the Pentagon, including experiments with coronavirus strains, anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases. Frantic attempts are being made to conceal traces of these secret programmes. However, we have grounds to assume that components of biological weapons were being created in direct proximity to Russia on the territory of Ukraine.

Our numerous warnings that such developments posed a direct threat to the security of Russia were rejected with open and cynical arrogance by Ukraine and its US and NATO patrons.

In other words, all our diplomatic efforts were fully in vain. We have been left with no peaceful alternative to settle the problems that developed through no fault of ours. In this situation, we were forced to begin this special military operation.

The movement of Russian forces against Kiev and other Ukrainian cities is not connected with a desire to occupy that country. This is not our goal, as I pointed out openly in my statement on February 24.

As for the combat tactics drafted by the Defence Ministry of Russia and the General Staff, this has fully justified itself. Our fellows – soldiers and officers – are displaying courage and heroism and are doing all they can to avoid civilian losses in Ukrainian cities.

This is what I would like to say for the first time: at the very start of the operation in Donbass, the Kiev authorities were offered opportunities to avoid hostilities, via different channels, to simply withdraw their troops from Donbass as an alternative to bloodshed. They did not want to do this. Well, this was their decision; now they will understand what is happening in reality, on the ground.

The operation is being carried out successfully, in strict conformity with the approved plan.

I must note that, encouraged by the United States and other Western countries, Ukraine was purposefully preparing for a scenario of force, a massacre and an ethnic cleansing in Donbass. A massive onslaught on Donbass and later Crimea was just a matter of time. However, our Armed Forces have shattered these plans.

Kiev was not just preparing for war, for aggression against Russia – it was conducting it. There were endless attempts to stage acts of subversion and organise a terrorist underground in Crimea. Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of peaceful residential areas have continued all these years. Almost 14,000 civilians, including children have been killed over this time.

As you know, there was a missile strike at the centre of Donetsk on March 14. This was an overt bloody act of terror that took over 20 lives. Shelling has been ongoing during the past few days. They are striking randomly at squares with the fervor of fanatics and the exasperation of the doomed. They are acting like the Nazis did when they tried to drag as many innocent victims as they could to their graves.

But what is shocking in its extreme cynicism is not just Kiev’s blatant lies and statements that Russia allegedly launched this missile at Donetsk (they have gone as far as this), but the attitude of the so-called civilised world. The European and American press did not even notice this tragedy in Donetsk, as if nothing happened.

This is how they have been hypocritically looking the other way over the past eight years as mothers buried their children in Donbass, as elderly people were killed. This is simply moral degradation, complete de-humanisation.

It was no longer possible to tolerate this outrageous attitude towards the people of Donbass. To put an end to this genocide, Russia recognized the people’s republics of Donbass and signed treaties of friendship and mutual aid with them. Based on these treaties, the republics appealed to Russia for military aid in rebuffing the aggression. We rendered this aid because we simply could not do otherwise. We had no right to act otherwise.

I would like to emphasise this point and draw your attention to it: if our troops had acted only within the people's republics and helped them liberate their territory, it would not have been a final solution, it would not have led to peace and would not have ultimately removed the threat – to our country, this time to Russia. On the contrary, a new frontline would have been extended around Donbass and its borders, and shelling and provocations would have continued. In other words, this armed conflict would have continued indefinitely. It would have been fuelled by the revanchist hysteria of the Kiev regime, as NATO deployed its military infrastructure faster and more aggressively. In this case, we would have been faced with the fact that the attack, the offensive weapons of the alliance were already at our borders.

I will repeat – we had no alternative for self-defence, for ensuring Russia's security, to this special military operation. We will reach the goals we set. We will certainly ensure the security of Russia and our people and will never allow Ukraine to be a bridgehead for aggressive actions against our country.

We remain ready to discuss matters of fundamental importance to Russia’s future during the talks. This includes Ukraine’s status as a neutral country, and demilitarisation and denazification. Our country has done everything it could to organise and hold these talks realising that it is important to use every opportunity to save people and their lives.

But time and time again we see that the Kiev regime, which its Western handlers have charged with the task of creating an aggressive “anti-Russia” stance, does not care about the future of the people of Ukraine. They do not care that people are dying, that hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people had to flee their homes, and that a horrendous humanitarian disaster is unfolding in the cities controlled by the neo-Nazis and armed criminals who were cut loose.

Clearly, Kiev’s Western patrons are just pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They incessantly supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.

They are using economic, financial, trade and other sanctions against Russia as weapons, but these sanctions have backfired in Europe and in the United States where prices of gasoline, energy and food have shot up, and jobs in the industries associated with the Russian market have been cut. So, do not shift the blame on us and do not accuse our country of everything that goes wrong in your countries.

I want ordinary Western people hear me, too. You are being persistently told that your current difficulties are the result of Russia’s hostile actions and that you have to pay for the efforts to counter the alleged Russian threat from your own pockets. All of that is a lie.

The truth is that the problems faced by millions of people in the West are the result of many years of actions by the ruling elite of your respective countries, their mistakes, and short-sighted policies and ambitions. This elite is not thinking about how to improve the lives of their citizens in Western countries. They are obsessed with their own self-serving interests and super profits.

This can be seen in the data provided by international organisations, which clearly show that social problems, even in the leading Western countries, have exacerbated in recent years, that inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, and racial and ethnic conflicts are making themselves felt. The myth of the Western welfare society, the so-called golden billion, is crumbling.

To reiterate, the whole planet is now paying for the West’s ambitions and the West’s attempts to maintain its elusive dominance by any means possible.

CIA Been Building Up Its Ukrainian Nazi Insurgency Since The Obama Administration...,

antiwar |  CIA paramilitaries had been training Ukrainian forces on the frontlines of the Donbas war against Russian-backed separatists since 2014 and were only pulled out by the Biden administration last month, Yahoo News reported on Wednesday, citing former US officials.

The CIA first sent a small number of paramilitaries to eastern Ukraine when the war started in 2014, which was sparked by a US-backed coup in Kyiv and the Donbas separatists declaring independence from the post-coup government.

As part of the training, CIA paramilitaries taught Ukrainian forces sniper techniques, how to operate US-provided Javelin anti-tank missiles, and how to avoid being tracked on the battlefield by using covert communications and other means. The former officials said at first the CIA was surprised at the capability of Russia and the separatists compared with US adversaries in the Middle East.

The US military held similar training programs for Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine that have been publicly acknowledged. In January, Yahoo News revealed that the CIA had also been holding a US-based training program for Ukrainian forces. A former CIA official said the US-based program was training “an insurgency” and taught Ukrainians how to “kill Russians.”

The secret CIA program in eastern Ukraine was much more provocative than the other training programs since it essentially meant the US was involved in a proxy war on Russia’s border. The former officials told Yahoo News that During the first year of the Trump administration, National Security Officials reviewed the program, which had begun under the Obama administration.

The CIA paramilitaries were directed to advise and train but not participate in combat. Trump administration officials feared the authorities were too broad and that the mission was too ambiguous. One former official said questions that were asked included: “How far can you go with existing covert action authorities? If, God forbid, they’ve shot some Russians, is that a problem? Do you need special authorities for that?”

The former official said that the Trump administration discussed what Russia’s redlines could be and determined the US support for Ukrainian forces fell within historically acceptable bounds. “There was a school of thought that the Russians spoke the good old language of proxy war,” the official said.

Despite the concerns, the secret program continued for years until February. The former officials said that when a Russian invasion became “increasingly acute,” the Biden administration pulled all CIA personnel out of Ukraine, including the paramilitaries. One former official said the Biden administration was “terrified of even clandestine folks being on the frontline.”

Although it’s hard to know what the military situation looks like in Ukraine, the US claims Ukraine is putting up a much fiercer resistance than Russia expected. The former officials who spoke with Yahoo News suggested the resistance was in part thanks to the CIA training program. The US continues to fuel the fighting as President Biden has already pledged over $1 billion in new military aid for Ukraine since the invasion started.

Brandon Bends Over Backwards For Kolomoisky Ukraine

businessinsider |  A top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised US President Joe Biden on Thursday.

"Grateful to [the US], our reliable partner," the aide, Andriy Yermak, wrote in a tweet. "The @POTUS does more for [Ukraine] than any of his predecessors."

Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, was impeached in 2019 and charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment focused on Trump's efforts to strongarm Zelenskyy into launching political investigations into the Bidens by withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine and dangling a White House meeting.

The hold on the security assistance was lifted after Politico reported on Trump's actions and House Democrats launched an investigation into the matter.

At the center of the impeachment was a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy, in which Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to open investigations into purported corruption by Biden and his son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 US election.

Trump also asked Zelenskyy to investigate the nonsense conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, and that Ukraine is in possession of a secret Democratic email server.

Yermak, as a senior advisor to Zelenskyy, was privy to Trump's and his aides' efforts to force Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

Trump, for his part, has insisted that Russia's invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if he was still in office.

"If I were in Office, this deadly Ukraine situation would never have happened!" he said in a statement last month.

But days earlier, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification to launch the war as "genius" and "savvy."

His comments stood in contrast to those of US officials, who warned that Putin's recognition of two Kremlin-backed separatist regions in Ukraine was part of an effort to create a false pretext and invade the country.

Trump was repeatedly criticized throughout his presidency for making public statements and policy decisions that benefited Russia and hurt Ukraine.

 

 

 

NYTimes Finally Admits "Russian Disinfo" Hunter Biden Laptop Is Authentic....,

greenwald  |  One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

 

These "former intel officials" did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo." Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this "suspicion" based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were "Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation.”

 

Crackhead Zelensky Doing All His Fake-Heroic Stunting From The Safety Of Poland...,

johnhelmer |  The summit meeting of East European leaders, hosted in Kiev by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on March 15 was fabricated by the Polish government, with Polish secret service agents playing the part of journalists, and fake photographs of the meeting, press briefing, and train journey prepared by Zelensky’s press office.

The operation was designed by the Poles to promote their role in support of the Ukraine, the Ukrainian refugees, and in defence of Europe against Russia, and seek new European, American,  and NATO alliance funds and military equipment.

A according to the Ukrainian publicity, the operation was designed to promote the appearance that Zelensky’s regime is in control of Kiev, and to accelerate their application for admission to the European Union (EU).

The Anglo-American media have reported the meeting, as announced by Petr Fiala, the Czech  prime minister, with “the aim…to express the European Union’s unequivocal support for Ukraine and its freedom and independence,”

The result of the summit meeting, according to the Financial Times in London, was “a show of European solidarity even as Russian shelling continued on residential neighbourhoods in the Ukrainian capital. The trip by the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia is the most high-profile visit to Kyiv since Russia invaded the country on February 24.”

“It is here, in war-torn Kyiv, that history is being made,” the Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced. “It is here that freedom fights against the world of tyranny. It is here that the future of us all hangs in the balance.”

Morawiecki and the western press were lying – there was no meeting in Kiev. Instead, the meeting was staged at the Polish rail junction town of Przemysl, 95 kilometres west of Lvov (Lviv), and 20 kms inside the Polish frontier with the Ukraine.

In a report published by the Associated Press (AP) bureau in Warsaw, “the long journey over land from Poland to Kyiv by Morawiecki, Poland’s deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Prime Ministers Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic and Janez Jansa of Slovenia sent the message that most of Ukraine still remains in Ukrainian hands.”

The evidence gathered from sources in Warsaw and from analysis of the videos and photographs published on the meeting proves there was no “long journey”; no meeting in Kiev or in Lvov, the Galician region capital, which is the operating headquarters of the Ukrainian government. From the evidence provided by the Poles and also by the Zelensky’s publicity staff, it is now clear that only a small part of western Ukraine remains in Ukrainian hands.  Zelensky himself is now in Polish hands.

Why DoD Puts Its Bioweapons Labs In African And Failed Eastern European States...,

undark  |  In 2004, an activist named Edward Hammond fired up his fax machine and sent out letters to 390 institutional biosafety committees across the country. His request was simple: Show me your minutes.

Few people at the time had heard of these committees, known as IBCs, and even today, the typical American is likely unaware that they even exist. But they’re a ubiquitous — and, experts say, crucial — tool for overseeing potentially risky research in the United States. Since 1976, if a scientist wants to tweak the DNA of a lab organism, and their institution receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, they generally need to get express safety approval from the collection of scientists, biosafety experts, and interested community members who sit on the relevant IBC. Given the long reach of the $46-billion NIH budget, virtually every research university in the U.S. is required to have such a board, as are plenty of biotechnology companies and hospitals. The committees “are the cornerstone of institutional oversight of recombinant DNA research,” according to the NIH, and at many institutions, their purview includes high-security labs and research on deadly pathogens. 

The agency also requires these committees to maintain detailed meeting minutes, and to supply them upon request to members of the public. But when Hammond started requesting those minutes, he found something else. Not only were many universities declining to share their minutes, but some didn’t seem to have active IBCs at all. “The committees weren’t functioning,” Hammond told Undark. “It was just an absolute joke.”

The issue has gained fresh urgency amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Many scientists, along with U.S. intelligence agencies, say it’s possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, emerged accidentally from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV — a coronavirus research hub in China that received grant funding from the NIH through a New York-based environmental health nonprofit. Overseas entities receiving NIH funding are required to form institutional biosafety committees, and while grant proposals to the NIH obtained by The Intercept mention an IBC at the Wuhan institution, it remains unclear what role such a committee played there, or whether one was ever really convened.

An NIH spokesperson, Amanda Fine, did not answer questions about whether the Wuhan institute has had a committee registered with the agency in the past. In an email, she referred to a roster of currently active IBCs, which does not list WIV. Other efforts by Undark to obtain details about meetings of the Wuhan lab’s IBC were unsuccessful. But so, too, were initial efforts to obtain meeting minutes from several IBCs conducting what is supposed to be both routine and publicly transparent business on U.S. soil. Undark recently contacted a sample of eight New York City-area institutions with requests for copies of IBC meeting minutes and permission to attend upcoming meetings. Most did not respond to initial queries. It took nearly two months for any of the eight institutions to furnish minutes, and some did not provide minutes at all, suggesting that in many cases, the IBC system may be as opaque and inconsistently structured as when Hammond, who eventually testified before Congress on the issue in 2007, first began investigating.

Indeed, recent interviews with biosafety experts, scientists, and public officials suggest that IBC oversight still varies from institution to institution, creating a biosafety system that’s uneven, resistant to public scrutiny, and subject to minimal enforcement from the NIH. Hammond and other critics say these problems are baked into the system itself: As the country’s flagship funder of biomedical research, the NIH, these critics say, shouldn’t also be charged with overseeing its safety.

 

Russia Promises More Disclosures On Ukrainian Biolabs

RT  |  The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday it will soon release additional documents pertaining to the operation of Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine. Moscow believes they have been involved in bioweapons research.

Russian military specialists in weapons of mass destruction are analyzing documents obtained from staff members of the Ukrainian labs, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily briefing. He claimed they detailed “implementation by the US in Ukraine of a secret project to study the ways humans can be infected from bats,” which was done in Kharkov.

The official said the same Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in the Ukrainian city worked for years to study under which conditions wild birds carrying flu could cause an epidemic in humans and to assess the damage that would result.

Konashenkov didn’t explain why such research should be considered military in nature, as assessed by the defense ministry.

The spokesman further said more Ukrainian documents will soon be released on the transfer of human samples from Ukraine to the UK and other European nations. The materials will be accompanied by Russian military assessments of the work they detail, he said.

The Pentagon sponsors dozens of labs around the world under the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work they do, the US government claims, is benign and is meant to monitor emergence of new dangerous infections. Countries like Russia and China believe they may be more sinister in nature.

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said under oath that labs in Ukraine have been destroying research materials to prevent Russia from seizing them. It was not clear why Washington saw the scenario as dangerous. US officials claimed that the pathogens in question were remnants of Soviet bioweapons programs, which Moscow would presumably already have access to.

Some American public figures, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were attacked for asking questions about the Ukrainian labs, which supposedly amounts to repeating “Russian propaganda.” 

Utah Senator Mitt Romney accused Gabbard of spreading “treasonous lies” with her concerns about the safety of pathogen samples in Ukraine. The hosts of The View television show suggested people asking such questions should be arrested and investigated as possible Russian agents.

 

After Nuland And Rubio, You Just Knew A False Flag Was Coming...,

thesaker  |  The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials on the implementation of military biological programs of the United States and its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.

The information received from various sources confirms the leading role of the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency in financing and conducting military biological research on the territory of Ukraine.

Details of the UP-4 project became known, which was implemented with the participation of laboratories in Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa and was designed for the period up to 2020.

Its purpose was to study the possibility of the spread of particularly dangerous infections through migrating birds, including highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza, the mortality rate of which reaches 50 percent for humans, as well as Newcastle disease.

Due to the fact that Ukraine has a unique geographical location where transcontinental migration routes intersect, 145 biological species were studied within the framework of this project. At the same time, at least two species of migratory birds were identified, whose routes pass mainly through the territory of Russia. At the same time, information about migration routes passing through the countries of Eastern Europe was summarized.

Of all the methods developed in the United States to destabilize the epidemiological situation, this is one of the most reckless and irresponsible, since it does not allow to control the further development of the situation. This is confirmed by the course of the pandemic of a new coronavirus infection, the occurrence and features of which raise many questions.

In addition, the R-781 project is interesting, where bats are considered as carriers of potential biological weapons agents.

Among the priorities identified are the study of bacterial and viral pathogens that can be transmitted from bats to humans: pathogens of plague, leptospirosis, brucellosis, as well as coronaviruses and filoviruses.
It is noteworthy that the research is carried out in close proximity to the borders of Russia – in the areas of the Black Sea coast and the Caucasus.

The project is being implemented with the involvement of not only Ukrainian, but also Georgian biological laboratories controlled by the Pentagon in cooperation with the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the US Geological Survey.

The analyzed materials on the UP-8 project, aimed at studying the Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever virus and hantaviruses in Ukraine, clearly refute the US public statement that only Ukrainian scientists work in the Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine without the intervention of American biologists. One of the documents confirms that all serious high-risk studies are conducted under the direct supervision of specialists from the United States.

The payroll of Ukrainian contractors clearly demonstrates how they are financed. It has been confirmed that the US Department of Defence paid the money for research participation directly, without the involvement of intermediaries. The extremely modest pay, by US standards, is noteworthy. This indicates a low estimation of the professionalism of Ukrainian specialists and the neglect of their American colleagues.

In addition, the studied materials contain proposals for the expansion of the US military-biological program in Ukraine. Thus, there was evidence of the continuation of completed biological projects UP-2, UP-9, UP-10, aimed at studying the pathogens of anthrax and African swine fever.

The Pentagon is also interested in insect vectors capable of spreading dangerous infectious diseases. The analysis of the obtained materials confirms the transfer of more than 140 containers with ectoparasites of bats – fleas and ticks from the biolab in Kharkov abroad.

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva Has Been Aggressively Investigating U.S. Bioweapons Labs For Several Years

dilyana  |  The US Embassy to Tbilisi transports frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo for a secret US military program. Internal documents, implicating US diplomats in the transportation of and experimenting on pathogens under diplomatic cover were leaked to me by Georgian insiders. According to these documents, Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of Georgia and have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and biting insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi.

This military facility is just one of the many Pentagon biolaboratories in 25 countries across the world. They are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program – Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.

The Pentagon biolaboratory is heavily guarded. All passers-by within a radius of 100 m are filmed although the military biolaboratory is located within a residential area.

dilyana  |  While the US is planning to increase its military presence in Eastern Europe to “protect its allies against Russia”, internal documents show what American “protection” in practical terms means.

The Pentagon has conducted biological experiments with a potentially lethal outcome on 4,400 soldiers in Ukraine and 1,000 soldiers in Georgia. According to leaked documents, all volunteer deaths should be reported within 24 h (in Ukraine) and 48 h (in Georgia).

Both countries are considered the most loyal US partners in the region with a number of Pentagon programs being implemented in their territory. One of them is the $2.5 billion Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Biological engagement program which includes research on bio agents, deadly viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria being studied on the local population.

Project GG-21: “All volunteer deaths will be promptly reported”

The Pentagon has launched a 5-year long project with a possible extension of up to 3 years code-named GG-21: “Arthropod-borne and zoonotic infections among military personnel in Georgia”. According to the project’s description, blood samples will be obtained from 1,000 military recruits at the time of their military registration physical exam at the Georgian military hospital located in Gori.

Puppeteers Fighting Among Themselves...,

unz  |  But the largest feather in Kholomoisky’s cap is no doubt President Zelensky himself. Kholomoisky’s channel created and ran the “Servant of the People” show that featured Zelensky as an honest and intrepid President of Ukraine dedicated to fighting corruption and defending the Ukrainian people. When the elections came around, Kholomoisky’s people and his media resources went all out in campaigning for their man. My personal favorite play was when they bribed Facebook fortune-tellers to spin prophecies about the coming of the president-that-was-promised and thereby secured the superstitious peasant granny vote. If any Western politicians are reading this, put down Sun Tzu and try some of this Kholomoisky fellow’s stratagems during the next election cycle instead.

Now, Russia has declared that they are planning to do a thorough “denazification” campaign, which almost certainly means a thorough purge of the Galician faction from the positions that they have taken since Yushenko let them into the government. As for what will happen to the oligarchs who bankrolled this whole operation, well, that’s still somewhat up in the air. It’s worth point out that Russia used to have dealings with them right up until the events of Euromaidan. The arrangement was simple: Russia paid them to behave and not ally against Russia with the West. As we can see looking back, this was clearly a catastrophic strategy, and what’s worse, I can only shake my head at how uncreative and uninspired it was—a cardinal sin in my book. The worst possible outcome for Ukraine at this point is if Russia comes to a compromise with some element of the existing power structure in Ukraine once they wrap up the military operation. We now know that no negotiations with the Galician faction are possible, so we can cross them off the list. That leaves the Eastern Mafia. Rumors of Kholomoisky’s imminent surrender aside, I can’t help but hope that his chutzpah has finally crossed the line and that he will be forced to spend the rest of his days exiled in Israel along with his puppet Zelensky. As for the rest of the oligarchs, well, both Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Timoshenko held photo-ops in Kiev with Kalashnikovs in their hands, so we can cross them off the list as well. Further than that and we enter the realm of pure speculation.

Clearly, the best outcome would be for a military man from Russia with no history of doing politics or business in Ukraine to come in and take the reins as a vizier or military governor of sorts for a time. This solution may offend committed ideologists and apologists for Liberal Democracy (read: Oligarchy), but the hard truth of the situation that Ukraine finds itself in is one in which literally no one who was anywhere near the reins of power in that country for the last three decades has his hands clean. These people all looted, collaborated and murdered with near impunity for 30 years. With Russia now performing a political prison break from Liberal Oligarchic Occupation Government right before our very eyes, we can only hope that Ukraine will be able to follow suit and break free from the shackles as well.

Is This Octogenarian Dementia Or Syphilis?

 

When Oligarchs Fight Ukrainians Get Destroyed (And Naftali Bennett Has To Intervene)

mintpressnews  |  The Mega Group — a secretive group of billionaires to which Lauder belongs — was formed in 1991 by Charles Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, the latter of whom has received considerable media scrutiny following the July arrest of his former protege Jeffrey Epstein. Media profiles of the group paint it as “a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” focused on “philanthropy and Jewishness,” with membership dues upwards of $30,000 per year. Yet several of its most prominent members have ties to organized crime.

Mega Group members founded and/or are closely associated with some of the most well-known pro-Israel organizations. For instance, members Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt formed Birthright Taglit with the backing of then- and current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Steinhardt, an atheist, has stated that his motivation in helping to found the group was to advance his own belief that devotion to and faith in the state of Israel should serve as “a substitute for [Jewish] theology.” 

Other well-known groups associated with the Mega Group include the World Jewish Congress — whose past president, Edgar Bronfman, and current president, Ronald Lauder, are both Mega Group members — and B’nai B’rith, particularly its spin-off known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Bronfman brothers were major donors to the ADL, with Edgar Bronfman serving as the ADL’s honorary national vice-chair for several years. 

When Edgar Bronfman died in 2013, long-time ADL Director Abe Foxman said, “Edgar was for many years Chair of our Liquor Industry Division, Chair of our New York Appeal, and one of our most significant benefactors.” Other Mega Group members that are donors and major supporters of the ADL include Ronald Lauder, Michael Steinhardt and the late Max Fisher. As previously mentioned, Roy Cohn’s father was a long-time leader of B’nai B’rith’s influential New England-New York chapter and Cohn was later a celebrated member of its banking and finance lodge.

In addition, Mega Group members have also been key players in the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For instance, Max Fisher of the Mega Group founded the National Jewish Coalition, now known as the Republican Jewish Coalition — the main pro-Israel neoconservative political lobbying group, known for its support of hawkish policies, and whose current chief patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump’s top donors.

Though the Mega Group has officially existed only since 1991, the use of “philanthropy” to provide cover for more unscrupulous lobbying or business activities was pioneered decades earlier by Sam Bronfman, the father of Mega Group members Edgar and Charles Bronfman. While other North American elites like J.D. Rockefeller had previously used philanthropic giving as a means of laundering their reputations, Bronfman’s approach to philanthropy was unique because it was focused on giving specifically to other members of his own ethno-religious background.

Sam Bronfman, as was detailed in Part I of this series, had long-standing deep ties to organized crime, specifically Meyer Lanksy’s organized crime syndicate. Yet, Bronfman’s private ambition, according to those close to him, was to become a respected member of high society. As a consequence, Bronfman worked hard to remove the stain that his mob associations had left on his public reputation in Canada and abroad. He accomplished this by becoming a leader in Canada’s Zionist movement and, by the end of the 1930s, he was head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and had begun to make a name for himself as a philanthropist for Jewish causes.

Yet even some of Bronfman’s activism and philanthropy had hints of the mobster-like reputation he tried so hard to shake. For instance, Bronfman was actively involved in the illegal shipping of arms to Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine prior to 1948, specifically as a co-founder of the National Conference for Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation that smuggled weapons to the paramilitary group Haganah. 

At the same time Bronfman was abetting the illegal smuggling of weapons to the Haganah, his associates in the criminal underworld were doing the same. After World War II, close aides of David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first prime minister of Israel and was instrumental in the founding of Mossad, forged tight-knit relationships with Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Mickey Cohen and other Jewish gangsters of the period. They used their clandestine networks to establish a vast arms smuggling network between the United States and Zionist settlements in Palestine, arming both the Haganah and the Irgun paramilitary groups. As noted in Part I of this report, at the same time these gangsters were aiding the illegal arming of ZIonsit paramilitaries, they were strengthening their ties to U.S. intelligence that had first been formally (though covertly) established in World War II. 

After Israel was founded, Sam Bronfman worked with future Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to negotiate the sale of Canadian armaments at half-price to Israel and the bargain weapons purchase was paid for entirely by a fundraising dinner hosted by Bronfman and his wife. Many years later, Peres would go on to introduce another future prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, to Jeffrey Epstein.

The rest of the Bronfman family’s march on “the road to respectability” was undertaken by Bronfman’s children, who married into aristocratic families such as the European Rothschilds and the Wall Street “royalty” of the Lehmans and the Loebs. 

The Bronfmans’ newfound respectability did not mean that their association with the Lansky-led criminal empire had dissolved. Indeed, prominent members of the Seagrams dynasty came under fire in the 1960s and 1970s for their close association with Willie “Obie” Obront, a major figure in Canadian organized crime, whom Canadian professor Stephen Schneider has referred to as the Meyer Lansky of Canada.

However, Edgar and Charles Bronfman were hardly the only members of the Mega Group with deep and long-standing ties to the Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate. Indeed, one of the group’s prominent members, hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt, opened up about his own family ties to Lansky in his autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out the Markets, where he noted that his father, Sol “Red McGee” Steinhardt, was Lansky’s jewel fence of choice and a major player in New York’s criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his son’s first client on Wall Street and helped him jumpstart his career in finance.

The ties between the Mega Group and the National Crime Syndicate don’t stop there. Another prominent member of the Mega Group with ties to this same criminal network is Max Fisher, who has been described as Wexner’s mentor and is also alleged to have worked with Detroit’s “Purple Gang” during Prohibition and beyond. The Purple Gang were part of the network that smuggled Bronfman liquor from Canada into the United State during Prohibition, and one of its founders, Abe Bernstein, was a close associate of both Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. Fisher was a key adviser to several U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as to

 

The Untouchable Bill Browder REDUX (Originally Posted 7/23/18)

unz  |  What makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This is probably a uniquely Jewish quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to political figures. The Arabs will spend more on horses and jets, the Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like politicians. The Russian NTV channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here they present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand dollars was given by Browder’s structures officially to the senators and congressmen in order to promote the Magnitsky Act.

Much bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff, mega-rich Jewish American businessmen, said the researchers in two articles published on the Veteran News Network and in The Huffington Post.

These two articles were taken off the sites very fast under pressure of Browder’s lawyers, but they are available in the cache. They disclose the chief beneficiary of Browder’s generosity. This is Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind Magnitsky Act legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called the Cardin List. Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent member of Israel Lobby.

LinkBookmarkBrowder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime. Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder, Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary of the scam that (according to Browder) took over his Russian assets is another Jewish businessman Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York court as is well described in this thoughtful piece).

Browder began his way to riches under the patronage of a very rich and very crooked Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born Jewish businessman who assumed a Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million dollars from his company pension fund before dying in mysterious circumstances on board of his yacht in the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli Military Intelligence, Ari Ben Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent for years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the Israelis about Israeli whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many years in Israeli jails.

Geoffrey Goodman wrote Maxwell “was almost certainly being used as – and using himself as – a two-way intelligence conduit [between East and West]. This arrangement included passing intelligence to the Israeli secret forces with whom he became increasingly involved towards the end of his life.”

After Maxwell, Browder switched allegiance to Edmond Safra, a very rich Jewish banker of Lebanese origin, who also played East vs West. Safra provided him with working capital for his investment fund. Safra’s bank has been the unlikely place where the IMF loan of four billion dollars to Russia had been transferred—and disappeared. The Russian authorities say that Browder has been involved in this “crime of the century,” next to Safra. The banker’s name has been connected to Mossad: increasingly fearful for his life, Safra surrounded himself by Mossad-trained gunmen. This did not help him: he died a horrible death in his bathroom when his villa was torched by one of the guards.

The third Jewish oligarch on Browder’s way was Boris Berezovsky, the king-maker of Yeltsin’s Russia. He also died in his bathroom (which seems to be a constant feature); apparently he committed suicide. Berezovsky had been a politically active man; he supported every anti-Putin force in Russia. However, a few months before his death, he asked for permission to return to Russia, and some negotiations went on between him and Russian authorities.

His chief of security Sergey Sokolov came to Russia and purportedly brought with him some documents his late master prepared for his return. These documents allege that Browder had been an agent of Western intelligence services, of the CIA to begin with, and of MI6 in following years. He was given a code name Solomon, as he worked for Salomon Brothers. His financial activity was just a cover for his true intentions, that is to collect political and economic data on Russia, and to carry out economic war on Russia. This revelation has been made in the Russia-1 TV channel documentary Browder Effect, (broadcasted 13.04.2016), asserting that Browder was not after money at all, and his activities in Russia, beside being very profitable, had a political angle.

The documents had been doubted for some linguistic reasons discussed by Gilbert Doctorow who comes to a reasonable conclusion: “Bill Browder[‘s]… intensity and the time he was devoting to anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no way comparable to the behaviour of a top level international businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play. But at the time, no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an operative of the intelligence agencies. Whatever the final verdict may be on the documents presented by the film “The Browder Effect,” it raises questions about Browder that should have been asked years ago in mainstream Western media if journalists were paying attention. Yevgeny Popov deserves credit for highlighting those questions, even if his documents demand further investigation before we come to definitive answers”.

We do not know whether Browder is, or had been, a spy. This should not surprise us, as he was closely connected to Maxwell, Safra and Berezovsky, the financiers with strong ties in the intelligence community.

Perhaps he outlived his usefulness, Mr Browder did. He started the Cold war, now is the time to keep it in its healthy limits and to avoid a nuclear disaster or rapid armaments race. This is the task we may hope will be entertained by the next US President, Mr Donald Trump.